A 15-minute prescription for boosting literacy rates

Julie Baker Finck, Ph.D.

Published
4:01 pm CDT, Thursday, April 14, 2016

While there is no vaccination against low literacy when a child is born, there is substantial research on the need for this vital prescription to be issued to families: Read aloud at least 15 minutes every day with your child.

Research shows that reading aloud is the single most important activity parents, grandparents, childcare providers, teachers and other caring adults can engage in with a child to develop critical, early language and foundational skills for learning how to read. These emergent literacy and developmental skills include building vocabulary and comprehension; promoting print awareness, letter recognition, and word structure; sparking imagination and creativity; fostering listening and attention skills; forming interpersonal bonds and self-esteem; and establishing a positive association with books and a love of reading. In addition, reading aloud in the early years exposes children to story and print knowledge, as well as to words and concepts uncommon in conversations or digital media.

Reading aloud also stimulates brain activity. During the first three years of life, a child’s brain makes trillions of connections, the fastest it will ever grow. This is a crucial time for teaching and learning. To illustrate, children learn language rapidly, and with appropriate interactions and stimuli, can quadruple the number of words they know between ages 1 and 2. Also, 90 percent of a child’s brain growth occurs by age 5. That is why it is critically important that adults and children have quality interactions and engage in learning experiences early and often. Unfortunately, fewer than half of children age five and under nationally are read to aloud each day.

Inadequate quality interactions during the early years of life, including reading aloud regularly, will lead to children being ill-prepared for kindergarten and set them behind when it comes to learning how to read. Far too many Houston children each year enter kindergarten lacking essential, foundational reading-readiness skills, including listening comprehension, letter knowledge, phonemic awareness and vocabulary. For example, nearly 2 out of 5 children entering HISD kindergarten classrooms for the 2015-2016 school year were seriously below grade level and were identified as in need of intensive intervention based on their overall performance on the required beginning of year reading assessment. Furthermore, the online-administered test results showed that nearly half of the more than 12,000 kindergarteners who took the exam had a vocabulary well below expected levels. Reading aloud early and often matters.

When children lack foundational reading skills when they enter school, they are at risk of needing costly interventions and special education services, being chronically absent, dropping out of school, becoming pregnant as a teen, and being incarcerated as a youth. These consequences impact the social and economic vitality of our city by reinforcing the ongoing cycles of poverty and dependency. In essence, poor school readiness impacts all of us.

Help us spread the word about the importance of reading aloud 15 minutes each and every day by sharing this article with friends and family or incorporating this information into your family literacy or parent engagement programs. Also, check out additional resources on our website at BushHoustonLiteracy.org.

Julie Baker Finck, Ph.D. is president of the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation